Review of Arlington Road (1999) by Kenny H — 29 Aug 2008

I'm a sucker, a grade-A sucker, for thrillers like this. My interests, more often than not, lean toward an uncanny sense of horror that rises out of normality (though you can see why I didn't list that in my facebook interests). Suburbia plays a key role in that kind of stuff these days.

Arlington Road, for the most part, plays to my interests almost exclusively; an evil infiltrating what is commonly considered clean and good, an atmospheric tension created almost entirely in broad daylight (i.e. Stepford Wives) mixed with 70s style paranoia (with modern day sensibilities, of course).

After a solid hour of tension and creepy performances from Robbins (oddly enough perfectly cast) and Cusack. Bridges has done paranoia films before (Winter Kills, Cutter's Way) and he's really good here, too.

This is a film that gets your blood up. It's exhillerating, it's pulse-pounding...for 115 minutes. Oh, wait, it's 119 minutes? Is that a discrepancy or is the last four minutes bullshit?

It's bullshit. It's a bad, twilight zone wannabe of a twist ending. To it's credit, we care enough about these characters to find it effective, but upon reflection, it just flat doesn't work.

This script was a thesis by Ehren Kruger, the man who later wrote the worst Scream movie to date (Scream The Third) and the dismal The Ring. You can tell it's an assignment. Sometimes it comes off as hitting all the notes it has to to be a movie, and other times it's genuinely new. Though there are other parts of it make it clear the plucky grad student (I assume all grad students are plucky, especially when they're chicks and are helping find solutions to threatening national disasters) passed with flying colours. Other times, it feels like a studio hungry for more Shyamalan-esque twists preyed upon his script, and he fed it to them - hell, he even half-baked it.